C. S. Lewis’s Philosophy of Gender

Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve:
C. S. Lewis’s Images of Gender
by joshua phillip herring
234 pages, davenant Press, $31.95

When Lucy steps through the wardrobe into Narnia and runs into the faun Mr. Tumnus, he exclaims, “Excuse me—I don’t want to be inquisitive—but should I be right in thinking that you are a Daughter of Eve?” 

Mr. Tumnus has never met a human, let alone a girl, yet he recognizes what Lucy is. All of Narnia, we soon learn, has been on the lookout for two sons of Adam and two daughters of Eve who are foretold to topple the White Witch’s rule. 

Joshua Herring explores this and other passages from C. S. Lewis’s fiction in Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve: C. S. Lewis’s Images of Gender. Herring, a professor of classical education and humanities at Thales College, argues that across Lewis’s stories runs a clear stream of thought on what sex and gender mean, one that washes away much modern confusion. 

Lewis believed sex and gender to be real, unchangeable things, neither social constructs to be discarded nor physical impediments to be overcome. He also believed that everything we have is a gift from God to be stewarded. Some of his characters embody these convictions with joy, while others—like the White Witch from Narnia and early Mark and Jane in That Hideous Strength—twist themselves in pursuit of something else, in the process becoming less themselves. 

The idea of unmaking oneself runs throughout Lewis’s canon. Think of the grumbling woman in The Great Divorce, Lewis’s imaginary field trip to heaven from hell. She complained incessantly on earth, and in hell has been reduced to merely a grumble. Her personhood is gone, eaten away until she is recognizable only by her vice. 

If sin makes us less ourselves, then rightly ordering ourselves according to reality doesn’t cramp our personality—it enhances it. We are most ourselves when we are most in line with how God made us, including in our masculinity and femininity. 

That’s no epiphany for orthodox Christians, and the book’s blurb leans heavily into this readily graspable theme of accepting what God has given. But from there Herring’s read on Lewis goes a step further, suggesting that the ideas of masculinity and femininity are not only real categories that exist apart from cultural norms, but are in fact more real than sex. 

Herring observes Lewis’s Neoplatonic tendencies and turns to The Space Trilogy, in which Ransom meets Malacandra (Mars) and Perelandra (Venus), who are unquestionably masculine and feminine but whose bodies have no sexual characteristics whatsoever. Ransom grasps for words to describe them, attempting comparisons like rhythm and melody. Lewis sums up his difficulty: “What Ransom saw in that moment was the real meaning of gender.” So gender is the category into which sex falls. Sex is one physical manifestation of a larger concept. 

The big question then is, “What is gender?” Herring, taking cues from Lewis’s description of Malacandra and Perelandra, postulates that “the masculine is oriented towards strength, rigidity, and protection of life, while the feminine is oriented towards softness, fluidity, and creation of life.” This suggests men are most themselves when they lean into their strength and duty to protect others, and women are most themselves when they care for the conditions conducive to life—a rubric Herring uses to grade almost every character in The Chronicles of Narnia. The White Witch turns others to stone, so she’s a bad image of femininity. High King Peter fights to defend Narnia, so he’s a good image of masculinity. 

The exposition is interesting and exceptionally thorough, but it feels a bit rushed, as though we’ve jumped to the scientist’s work of cataloguing specimens before adequately settling the big question of what gender means. This is partly an issue of limited scope: Herring looks primarily at The Space Trilogy and The Chronicles of Narnia, leaving aside Lewis’s other fiction as well as most of his nonfiction. As a result, the book largely assumes rather than argues that gender bifurcates along the lines of strength and protection on one side, softness and creation on the other, and while Herring maps many of Lewis’s fictional characters onto this rubric, the reader is left unsure to what extent such a rubric is correct. 

Such assumptions also lead Herring to see sexual metaphors throughout Narnia, sometimes in ways that feel inappropriate in a children’s series. Did Lewis really intend “further up and further in” to carry sexual connotations? At other times he offers a fascinating comment and lets it drop, unexplored. He notes that when a terrified Jill first meets Aslan in The Silver Chair, Aslan calls her “Human Child,” but upon their reconciliation refers to her as “Daughter of Eve.” He quotes Lewis in That Hideous Strength referencing seven genders, and observes that in many Narnia books, Aslan appears more frequently to the female characters than to the male. These are all interesting observations, but they receive little further comment. 

Probably the concept most deserving of further exploration is Herring’s comparison of gender and the Tao, Lewis’s term for natural law in The Abolition of Man. The Tao represents absolute right and wrong as universal principles recognized by all human societies, but codified in different ways. We all sense that murder is wrong, but different societies define or punish it differently. So too, Herring suggests, gender is a universal principle recognized and reflected in different ways in different societies, not as social inventions, but as better or worse reflections of reality. Both the Tao and gender are woven into the very fabric of reality, so that it is no accident that some words have masculine or feminine endings, or that some traits are associated with masculinity and femininity. These social phenomena point to something greater.

How should we think of the philosophy of gender woven throughout Narnia? I think of the scene near the end of The Last Battle, when Jill and Eustace get thrown into a stable that is bigger on the inside than on the outside. So too Lewis’s fiction holds bigger philosophical implications than first meet the eye. Herring peeks through the door and escorts us into a larger world of thought.